The retraction of 60 papers at one time (and resignation of the education minister), ‘predatory’ journals, journal hijackings, purported low inter-rater reliability, bias and conservatism and (obvious) difficulty in readily detecting fraud or misconduct are dynamics at science and medical journals that highlight a need to study these dynamics, starting with journal peer review.

The site is dedicated to the investigation of peer review as a scientific object of study – not a pre-constructed, self-evident process that is based on common experience with peer review. Of the hundreds of papers and studies on peer review that I have come across (starting in 1830 with Granville’s study), I have found only a handful that have attempted to carefully tend to the object of study prior to applying scientific methods of analysis. By this I mean that peer review was not laden with assumptions, i.e. that peer review must be pre-publication, that referees must be anonymous, or that peer review was borne of a need for rationality at the first journals in 1665.

One of the goals of the site therefore is to help steer research of peer review away from a common experience object to a decidedly scientific object. Currently, this site focuses on journal peer review at scientific and medical journals.